Did you remove the sunbeam purposely? Or did it just disappear when you enhanced it?

Your image certainly brings home the Pale Blue Dot theme.

At the distance Voyager 1 was from Earth in 1990, what would our planet's relativemagnitude be?

I just kept tinkering until I was able to make the 'background' around earth nice and dark -- then I tried to bring out a bit of the pale blue that was imaged by Voyager.

I would hate to try and guess what the earth's magnitude would be if one was riding 'on board' Voyager -- I would think right around 0.0 [neither negative nor positive] but I will leave this to someone more versed in the relative brightness of celestial objects.

So it was Voyager 1 which turned its camera back to the planets and took the 60 photo mosaic ( 39 wide-angle and 21 narrow-angle images ) photo now known as the 'Family portrait of the solar system' ... Pale Blue dot press meeting of June 1990.

I would hate to try and guess what the earth's magnitude would be if one was riding 'on board' Voyager

Half Venus has a magnitude of -4 from about 1 AU. Earth is about 1/4 the brightness of Venus. When Voyager was about 30 AU out, it would be 1/900 dimmer still. 1/3600 of Venus's brightness is 9 magnitudes dimmer, so a half Earth as seen from Voyager (Neptune) would be about a +5 magnitude object. A lot brighter than Neptune is, seen from Earth, since Earth is so much closer to a light source.

Interestingly, that means the planets "visible" to the human eye from Neptune would include Venus, Earth, Jupiter, and Saturn... probably not Uranus, which would show a crescent except when it was very far away.

So it was Voyager 1 which turned its camera back to the planets and took the 60 photo mosaic ( 39 wide-angle and 21 narrow-angle images ) photo now known as the 'Family portrait of the solar system' ... Pale Blue dot press meeting of June 1990.

I can't find these raw images at PDS. Family portrait of the Solar system was taken by Voyager 1 on February 14, 1990. I found here last image taken by Voyager 2 on September 29, 1989. I hope that they are not lost.

I just checked with a friend at the Rings Node and he said that since neither the 1977 or 1990 images were part of an "encounter," they weren't part of the archiving process that sent data to the PDS. However, he expressed confidence that the data was lying around JPL somewhere, and said he'd check into it.

That is exciting news. I would love to see the dataset that included those post-launch Earth and Moon shots. Likewise, I believe Voyager imaged Mars as it crossed it’s orbit. That would be a fun group of images to see as well.

I have a large collection of Voyager Press Kits, so I guess I'll have to make these available in .pdf as soon as possible ;-)What I'm also interested in are the videos produced by KCET Public Television network which ran a nightly "Jupiter Watch" show during the months February and March 1979... about time someone put those on YouTube !

Has anyone ever seen an image of the flat white optical calibration plate ?

You can find images of the optical calibration plate at the PDS as well. There are some examples on nearly all of the volumes. They are labeled “CALIBRATION PLAQUE”.

Remember, even the wide angle camera had a relativity narrow field of view. Therefore, the image only includes a small part of the plaque. The imaged just look like a flat white field with a few imperfections caused by the camera itself.

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